Lessons from Fire: What Hiroshima, Tariffs and Japan's Rising Far Right Have in Common
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I've spoken extensively with survivors of a nation undone by ambition. A city mayor whose family were scattered to the four winds, a radiologist forever haunted by silent burns, an A-bomb survivor whose diaries spoke only of immense suffering and loss.
These people embody the costs of nationalism unchecked by humility or historical memory. Their testimony - a cracked voice recalling "the city turning to glass under dawn's light" - is not just history; it is a reckoning, as set out in my new book, The Hiroshima Men.
From that crucible of fire emerges a lesson we ignore at our peril: identity without self-criticism, economic pride without engagement, nationalism masquerading as preservation, can become pathways to ruin.
That lesson surfaces again in three modern arcs: Imperial Japan's economic autarky catalysing the Pacific War; President Trump's 2018-19 tariff regime which he has continued today; and the rise of Japan's far-right Sanseito party in 2025. These episodes are discrete - but connected. Each reveal how economic anxiety and identity politics feed one another, and how retreat from global cooperation causes inward fracture.
Imperial Japan turned autarky into doctrine - seeking oil in the Dutch East Indies, rice in the Philippines, rubber in Indochina to maintain its dominance in the region. They believed resource sovereignty would shield them.
Instead, they awakened the global powers and invited catastrophe; the country consumed by fire, including infamously, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A wartime bureaucrat in The Hiroshima Men recalled: "We were told we had rice for twenty years. We barely had enough for twenty weeks - and by then, the lie was wrapped in patriotism." That is the human cost of closure.
Fast-forward to modern America. President Trump's tariff blitz - on steel, aluminium, Chinese imports - was hailed as economic self-defence. Yet economists called it "the biggest trade policy shock… in history," imposed "off the charts in terms of scale, speed and uncertainty," in the words of The Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes. She warned that tariffs function as taxes on consumers: "The people who pay this in the end… pay more for the things that they buy." Trade rhetoric disguised real pain.
The Congressional Budget Office projected an annual household income drop of more than $1,200 in 2020. Wharton business school models pointed to long-run GDP losses of up to 6%, suggesting wage declines across multiple sectors. Mark Zandi of American credit-rating agency Moody's estimated a typical family losing $200-$250 per year in purchasing power. And Harvard economists found import prices rising 3% in just four months of tariff escalation in 2025.
Minton Beddoes added a broader caution: "I think we've crossed some kind of a Rubicon… we're not going back to the world as it was before… increasingly, [the US] is a sort of bullying, swaggering, transactional country". Where once global engagement underpinned stability, unilateral tariffs turned diplomacy into leverage and legality into confrontation.
In Japan today, Sanseito's abrupt rise reveals the same tension. A populist movement born online - ironically in platforms of globalist connectivity - it campaigned under the slogan "Japanese First". From a lone upper-house seat, Sanseito leapt to 14 (now reported as 15) seats in the 248-member chamber during the 20 July 2025 election - becoming the fourth-largest opposition force. Analysts attribute the surge to voter frustration over inflation, stagnant wages, a weak yen (¥149 to the dollar), food costs, and over-tourism in cities like Tokyo and Kyoto - rice prices reportedly doubling year on year.
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Sanseito's leader, Sohei Kamiya - a former English teacher, YouTuber, and ex-Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) member - has invoked g...
Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features
SUBSCRIBE TODAY
I've spoken extensively with survivors of a nation undone by ambition. A city mayor whose family were scattered to the four winds, a radiologist forever haunted by silent burns, an A-bomb survivor whose diaries spoke only of immense suffering and loss.
These people embody the costs of nationalism unchecked by humility or historical memory. Their testimony - a cracked voice recalling "the city turning to glass under dawn's light" - is not just history; it is a reckoning, as set out in my new book, The Hiroshima Men.
From that crucible of fire emerges a lesson we ignore at our peril: identity without self-criticism, economic pride without engagement, nationalism masquerading as preservation, can become pathways to ruin.
That lesson surfaces again in three modern arcs: Imperial Japan's economic autarky catalysing the Pacific War; President Trump's 2018-19 tariff regime which he has continued today; and the rise of Japan's far-right Sanseito party in 2025. These episodes are discrete - but connected. Each reveal how economic anxiety and identity politics feed one another, and how retreat from global cooperation causes inward fracture.
Imperial Japan turned autarky into doctrine - seeking oil in the Dutch East Indies, rice in the Philippines, rubber in Indochina to maintain its dominance in the region. They believed resource sovereignty would shield them.
Instead, they awakened the global powers and invited catastrophe; the country consumed by fire, including infamously, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A wartime bureaucrat in The Hiroshima Men recalled: "We were told we had rice for twenty years. We barely had enough for twenty weeks - and by then, the lie was wrapped in patriotism." That is the human cost of closure.
Fast-forward to modern America. President Trump's tariff blitz - on steel, aluminium, Chinese imports - was hailed as economic self-defence. Yet economists called it "the biggest trade policy shock… in history," imposed "off the charts in terms of scale, speed and uncertainty," in the words of The Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes. She warned that tariffs function as taxes on consumers: "The people who pay this in the end… pay more for the things that they buy." Trade rhetoric disguised real pain.
The Congressional Budget Office projected an annual household income drop of more than $1,200 in 2020. Wharton business school models pointed to long-run GDP losses of up to 6%, suggesting wage declines across multiple sectors. Mark Zandi of American credit-rating agency Moody's estimated a typical family losing $200-$250 per year in purchasing power. And Harvard economists found import prices rising 3% in just four months of tariff escalation in 2025.
Minton Beddoes added a broader caution: "I think we've crossed some kind of a Rubicon… we're not going back to the world as it was before… increasingly, [the US] is a sort of bullying, swaggering, transactional country". Where once global engagement underpinned stability, unilateral tariffs turned diplomacy into leverage and legality into confrontation.
In Japan today, Sanseito's abrupt rise reveals the same tension. A populist movement born online - ironically in platforms of globalist connectivity - it campaigned under the slogan "Japanese First". From a lone upper-house seat, Sanseito leapt to 14 (now reported as 15) seats in the 248-member chamber during the 20 July 2025 election - becoming the fourth-largest opposition force. Analysts attribute the surge to voter frustration over inflation, stagnant wages, a weak yen (¥149 to the dollar), food costs, and over-tourism in cities like Tokyo and Kyoto - rice prices reportedly doubling year on year.
Don't miss a story
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Sanseito's leader, Sohei Kamiya - a former English teacher, YouTuber, and ex-Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) member - has invoked g...
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